Director – John Farrow, Screenplay – Jonathan Latimer & Barré Lyndon, Based on the Novel Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1945) by Cornell Woolrich, Producer – Endre Bohem, Photography (b&w) – John F. Seitz, Music – Victor Young, Art Direction – Franz Bachelin & Hans Dreier. Production Company – Paramount.
Cast
Edward G. Robinson (John Triton), Gail Russell (Jean Courtland), John Lund (Elliott Carson), Virginia Bruce (Jenny), William Demarest (Lieutenant Shawn), Jerome Cowan (Whitney Courtland), Richard Webb (Peter Vinson), Onslow Stevens (Dr Walters)
Plot
Elliott Carson saves his fiancée Jean Courtland, who is about to throw herself to her death in a railyard. Elliott goes to confront John Triton whose prophecy about Jean dying under the stars led her there. John tells them his story. He once had a successful mentalist act but then began to receive visions that turned out to come true – of people in danger, of which horses will win races. These allowed his manager Whitney, Jean’s father, to bet on oil shares and become wealthy. John went away for twenty years before coming to Los Angeles. He then sought out Jean to warn her after he had a vision of Whitney dying in a plane crash. Elliott is certain that John is running a confidence scam and brings in the police. As John prophesies that Jean will die on a particular date, the police stake out the Courtland estate, determined to expose the scam.
Cornell Woolrich (1903-68) was a prolific writer of thrillers. Woolrich found his fame in the 1930s churning out a series of works in the detective and suspense genres. Woolrich was so productive he published under multiple pseudonyms, including some 25 novels and over 200 short stories. His work is noted for its dark psychological complexity and brooding atmosphere. The IMDB lists over a hundred film adaptations of Woolrich’s works. These include:- the Val Lewton production The Leopard Man (1943), the classic film noir Phantom Lady (1944), the precognitive dream film Fear in the Night (1948) later remade as Nightmare (1956), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), Francois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black (1968), the gialloSeven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972), the Tobe Hooper film I’m Dangerous Tonight (1990) about a haunted dress and the thriller Original Sin (2001), to name but the best known of these.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes came out at the height of Film Noir. Director John Farrow gives us a classic noir opening with shots of Gail Russell running through a railyard amid beautifully moody shots of a train emitting backlit steam and stark images of her on an overbridge ready to throw herself off as fiancé John Lund races to save her. It is a sequence that feels pure Noir in its evocation.
Night Has a Thousand Eyes was one of several Film Noir films that came out around the late 1940s with similar
Clairvoyance themes. Included amongst this can also be the original Nightmare Alley (1947), the Cornell Woolrich-adapted Fear in the Night, The Night My Number Came Up (1955) and Nightmare. The theme here of the stage mentalist whose faked visions start to become real has been used subsequently, most notedly in Black Rainbow (1989), which I think conducts a far better treatment of the story than Night Has a Thousand Eyes does.
(l to r) John Lund and fiancee Gail Russell look on as Edward G. Robinson (standing) predicts the future
There are assorted scenes at the start where Edward G. Robinson discovers his powers but most of the film’s story takes place in the last two-thirds where Robinson tries to impart his prophecy to Gail Russell and her father. The plot twists about in some interesting ways where the police at one point deduce that this all might be a big scam being conducted by Robinson. The latter sections of the film take place at the mansion where the critics are silenced as the things that Robinson prophesied start to come true. There is some good writing – I particularly liked the scene where Edward G. Robinson compares his visions to viewing a landscape while riding on a train vs someone who sees far more from the roof. On the other hand, this latter section is lacking in ambiguity, just the playing out as assorted cryptic phrases Robinson utters come to pass.
One of the problems with Night Has a Thousand Eyes for me was the casting of Edward G. Robinson, who was known for roles primarily as gangsters in Little Caesar (1931) and Key Largo (1948) and other roles in classic Film Noirs such as Double Indemnity (1944) and The Woman in the Window (1944). Robinson is a physical actor rather than an internal actor. You can easily imagine him cast as a gangster, the mayor of a city, a newspaper editor or a big boss. What the role here really requires though is someone thoroughly ordinary in the part and Robinson just doesn’t come across as convincingly weighed by the curse of his gift. Nor for that matter does he project the charisma of a stage performer during the early scenes where we see him performing his mentalist act.
